Marketing Cloud API FAQ: What Is The Purpose of This FAQ Document?

Marketing Cloud API FAQ
What is the Purpose of this FAQ Document?

The intent of this document is to cover the most frequently asked questions concerning the Marketing
Cloud API. To help you find particular questions quickly, the FAQs are categorized by the following
topics: Implementation, Product, and Troubleshooting.

Implementation FAQs
1. Is there any recommended practice to purposefully throwing exceptions from SSJS script
activities?
A: When developing with SSJS, follow the try/catch programming model and throw exceptions
where necessary. Below are some implementation examples
● Try/throw/catch was used for an API heavy SSJS smartsheet integration. It captures
useful errors without destroying the landing page and sends out email notifications.
● An automation activity that consumes data from external source throws exception that
stops the automation and also maintains a log DE with error logs.

2. Why am I seeing “unspecified” for campaign message name column in Omniture dashboard
for emails with dynamic subject lines? Should the subject line be included in the data extract
file or should it be the Email name for the Campaign message name field?
A: The subject name should be included. Below are the header mappings
File Header -> Mapping
Key -> JobID
Campaigns -> EmailName
Campaigns^Message Name -> Subject Line
Campaigns^Channel -> Default to "Exacttarget"
Campaigns^Delivery Tool -> "User Initiated" or "Triggered Email”

3. Does SSJS support certification authentication?
A: No, currently only oAuth is supported.

4. How do you send HTML attributes using the POST /messaging/v1/messageDefinitionSends?
A: Include the HTML tags in the payload as follows
"HTMLAttribute": "<html><b>Here is some HTML</b></html>

5. How to migrate move queries, filters, DE's, extracts, etc. from one 'Testing' BU to another
'Dev' or 'Production' BU?
A: MC DevOps and production migration tool can be used. However, this is only internal at this
point in time.

6. Is there a way to implement HTTP PUT in SSJS or AmpScript?
A: Script.Util.HttpRequest does not specifically perform the HTTP PUT but can be used as a
workaround. For more information refer to the documentation.

7. What is the best way to send API calls OUT of SFMC to a third party on an hourly basis?
A: An SSJS activity contained in an automation studio job that is scheduled for every hour
should be able to make the necessary API calls out of SFMC. However there is a 30 minute
activity cut off activity time.

Salesforce 1 of 3
8. How to integrate the MC Async Email with Point of Sale system?

A: This isn't really any different from a standard Async SOAP API email receipt for any type of
order confirmation (POS, web browser, mobile app). The confirmation system would trigger
data to an order confirmation trigger built within SFMC and the email would use ampscript or
GTL to process the data (if was sent as JSON or XML) sent over and populate the dynamic email.

9. Can I use any oAuth token provider with SFMC REST API?
A: Yes, as long it is a valid oAuth token, it can be passed along with every request to access
SFMC REST API. Once a valid token is obtained you could use either SSJS or AMPScript to hit
the endpoints. Each provider may have corresponding token expire time that needs to be taken
into account and accordingly the solution must be developed.

Product FAQs

1. Do we have any integration with MediaMath?
A: This would be tough as MediaMath only stores anonymous data whereas Marketing Cloud
focuses on known data. The current API integration is via Ad Studio through a data onboarder
whereas we can push segments to MediaMath via LiveRamp, Krux, etc and they push the
segments to MediaMath after matching data. Match rates are likely not going to be that strong.
If MediaMath stores a unique identifier and SFMC stores the same unique identifier within the
MC contact data model, you could potentially bring in first party data for opted in contacts.

2. Is there any API to monitor Marketing Cloud similar to core platform?
A: None at the moment.

3. Is there any soft limits on API requests?
A: Yes, there is a limit. Requests should be limited to 100 objects for async and 50 objects for
sync requests.

4. What is rate limiting?
A: Rate limiting is an operational control put together to identify an offending application that is
impacting performance of other customers. It is a tool primarily for Ops to throttle a particular
customer. The intent is not to cut off a customer but to throttle to an acceptable rate.

5. Rate limiting is not just the application of technology to maintain acceptable API limits but
also providing metrics via UI. The UI will have charts to view API usage by customer,
customer’s normal usage, current usage, whether the customer is already rate limited or not.
Ops team will have admin rights to modify the rate limiting threshold value by customer.

6. What are the different types of rate limiting?
A: Capacity – single customer ends up dominating more than 50% of the capacity then that
customer will be throttled and a lower threshold will be set. (Client Id as calling app)

7. What happens when a customer is throttled or rate limiting occurs?
A:
● Error code of 429 is returned. Payload is defined as reflected in the 206 documentation
as well as REST API page that describes error codes.
● There will be a reverse escalation process so that the customer identifies the issue in
their application and takes appropriate action in collaboration with Salesforce.
Salesforce 2 of 3

8. When will a customer be rate limited?
A: By default, no customer will be rate limited. It is a result of an operational control only if it is
impacting other customers. This can be observed in following ways:
1) Impacts performance, application responds slowly to requests
2) Increase error rate, timeouts across all customers

9. What is being rate limited?
A: The ops team will be rate limiting the number of concurrent connections coming from a
customer to Salesforce API gateway. This dictates on how many API calls are being made
simultaneously.

10. Do we have any SDK’s to access MC objects and data?
A: Yes, we provide Fuel SDK in C#, PHP and Java while Python and Ruby is community
supported. See documentation

Troubleshooting FAQs

1. What data points are required to troubleshoot my SOAP API triggered sends?
A:
a. Validate the SOAP envelope that was used to make the call using soapui
b. RequestID that was returned by the call
c. The intended method - what was the customer trying to do?
d. Was there any error response?
e. If this was an async call, has the customer tried sync call?

2. What are the DB tables that can be queried to troubleshoot async triggered sends?
A:
a. APILog Database
i. WSActivityLog - the log from web services machine, including API start time,
request id, machine received from etc.
b. Customer DB
i. asyncapirequest
ii. asyncapirequestdetail - The asyncapirequestdetail gives the request and response
object. Use Web Service Tool to unwrap the request and response payload.
iii. triggeredsendsubscriber
iv. triggeredsendjobsubscriber
v. jobsubscribererror
c. GSTools
i. Async API Dump Request

Salesforce 3 of 3

Marketing Cloud API FAQ: What Is The Purpose of This FAQ Document?

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Marketing Cloud API FAQ: What Is The Purpose of This FAQ Document?

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Marketing Cloud API FAQ: What Is The Purpose of This FAQ Document?

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What are some common issues encountered when implementing Marketing Cloud APIs?

What are some ways to troubleshoot issues with asynchronous triggered sends?

Marketing Cloud API FAQ

What is the Purpose of this FAQ Document?

8. How to integrate the MC Async Email with Point of Sale system?

You might also like